The Photon and the Dancing Mania

As you may have read on another of my posts, photons are everything. Really: they are everything. Now there is evidence that one of the world’s oldest unsolved mysteries – the dancing mania of the 1500s – was caused by photons.

In the 1500s, the European continent was sometimes subsumed by dancing mania. This was not your ordinary voluntary socially sanctioned means by which to advertise your wares to the opposite sex. No, this was involuntary – convulsive – dancing – that went on until dozens of participants had dropped dead. Some of them died after six or seven days of continuously ongoing, manic dancing.